A resident of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, whose name was undisclosed, has reportedly parted with $9.2 million after falling prey in a typical cryptocurrency romance fraud. The local police said it has never investigated a crypto-related scam where individuals have lost such a substantial sum. The Multi-Million Scheme As reported by Star Tribune, the man started chatting with...Read More
Blackberry has detected several malware families that are being used to run massive campaigns for stealing crypto from devices. In the August edition of ‘The BlackBerry Global Threat Intelligence Report,’ the former titan of the smartphone industry found that finance, healthcare, and government are the top three industries with the highest distribution of cyberattacks. Malware...Read More
On Aug. 2, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said he wanted to “share this (luckily) unsuccessful, but very clever and close scam incident from yesterday. It saved $20 million, he said before adding, “hope it may also save you one day.” Scammers are becoming more sophisticated, and their latest weapon is the generation of addresses with the...Read More
A phishing scammer recently nabbed $20 million in USDT from an unsuspecting victim using a zero transfer phishing attack, reported blockchain security firm PeckShield on Tuesday. The stolen funds were frozen in short order by Tether – the issuer behind USDT – raising questions about who the victim was given the speed of their response....Read More
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has sued the controversial crypto entrepreneur Richard Schueler, popularly known within the crypto community as Richard Heart, along with three of his entities, for allegedly engaging in unregistered securities sales and fraudulent activities. Heart purportedly used investors’ money to create a luxury lifestyle for himself, buying expensive items,...Read More
A Tennessee couple was charged for operating a $6 million digital assets commodity pool scheme by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) this week. The United States derivatives market regulator charged the owners of a Clarksville real estate company, Michael and Amanda Griffis, for allegedly defrauding more than 100 people across the country. The couple...Read More
The Valley Stream, New York resident – Eddy Alexandre – received a nine-year prison sentence for engaging in commodities fraud. He was found guilty of swindling $248 million from over 25,000 investors through his cryptocurrency trading platform called EminiFX. The investigation determined that Alexandre used some of the funds to purchase luxurious items for himself,...Read More
The Department of Justice (DOJ) of the United States plans to reinforce its team responsible for investigating cryptocurrency-related crimes with more prosecutors. The unit will also have a new leader, with Claudia Quiroz replacing Eun Young Choi at the helm. The team has played a major role in many of the DOJ’s crypto cases, such...Read More
Faruk Fetih Özer – founder of the once-leading Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex – will spend seven months and 15 days in jail for failing to submit necessary documents to the Tax Inspection Board. He also faces fraud charges about pocketing more than $2 billion in clients’ funds when the platform collapsed in 2021. While Özer...Read More
Canadian law enforcement agents have reportedly arrested the 39-year-old Akil Heywood over allegations that he kidnapped, threatened, and beat Aiden Pleterski in December 2022. The latter supposedly orchestrated a crypto scam, draining over $40 million from investors. Records show that Heywood invested $740,000 with Pleterski, making him one of the countless victims. The alleged fraudster...Read More
Popular on-chain sleuth ZachXBT has unmasked another crypto scammer responsible for stealing millions of dollars in digital assets using sophisticated phishing attacks. The thief’s targets included the discord services for DeFi projects such as Orbiter Finance and Pika Protocol. Impersonation and Confiscation In a Twitter thread published on Monday, ZachXBT explained that the attacker, Soup...Read More
The American authorities have reportedly arrested Brandon Austin and his father, Eugene “Hugh” Austin, over accusations that they run a massive crypto fraud, embezzling over $10 million from investors. Brandon, who has already pleaded guilty, will hear his sentence on September 6. Conning Investors to Fund a Lavish Lifestyle According to recent coverage, federal agents...Read More
Crypto inflows to known criminal addresses are down 65% in 2023 compared to the same period one year ago, according to a mid-year crime update from Chainalysis. However, one form of blockchain-based crime remains stubbornly persistent and is on the rise: Ransomware. Crypto Scammers On The Decline In a blog post from Chainalysis on Wednesday,...Read More
Blockchain detective ZachXBT has implicated a YouTuber with over 120,000 subscribers in over $1.5 million worth of crypto scams over the past two years. Some of those scams are connected to the infamous Monkey Drainer, an anonymous and boastful phishing scammer known for stealing people’s NFTs. Linking “Blue” to Monkey Drainer Before entering the world...Read More
Simon Hoadley – a 66-year-old retired financial advisor who lives in East Sussex, the UK – has reportedly become a victim of a “horrendous” cryptocurrency scam that drained nearly $100,000 from him. Fortunately, legal experts managed to recover nearly all the lost funds. Scammers Have No Mercy As reported by Mirror, Hoadley was looking to earn some...Read More
Two teenage boys from Hamilton, Ontario, have been busted for allegedly stealing over $4 million worth of bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) from an American man through what authorities described as a “spear phishing attack.” According to local reports, Hamilton police started working with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Secret...Read More
The United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has charged William Koo Ichioka for defrauding investors of tens of millions of dollars by claiming to be a digital asset and foreign exchange (forex) trader. According to an official statement, the CFTC filed a complaint against Ichioka in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District...Read More
Lux Vending – doing business as Bitcoin Depot – has reportedly filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office of McLennan County, Texas, accusing it of unlawfully seizing $15,000 from a BTC automated teller machine (ATM). The authorities confiscated the amount to compensate an elderly victim who had become a victim of a cryptocurrency scam. Bitcoin...Read More
A joint investigation by the FBI’s Money Laundering Squad and Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigations led to a 75-month prison sentence for 64-year-old Arizona entrepreneur Reginald Fowler. A former co-owner of the professional American football team Minnesota Vikings, Fowler has also been asked by the court to pay a forfeiture of $74.02 million and restitution of...Read More
A new report by blockchain security company Beosin revealed that the total amount of crypto assets lost to exit scams and rug pulls was higher than the amount stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) projects through exploits and attacks last month. Beosin also discovered that losses from the exploits in May were down 79% compared to...Read More
Long-term gold proponent and arguably the most popular full-time Bitcoin basher – Peter Schiff – has had his Twitter account comrpomised. According to Blockfence, Peter Schiff’s Twitter account has been compromised and hijacked. The perpetrator already published a tweet that leads to a phishing website. It’s advised not to click or interact with the link....Read More
The Twitter account belonging to OpenAI CTO Mira Murati was hacked on Thursday, and used to promote a scam crypto token supposedly backed by the company. The tweet stayed online for roughly an hour, garnering 80,000 views from platform users before being taken down. Another Scam AI Token The hacker promoted a fraudulent airdrop for...Read More
It appears that the DeFi industry continues to be a prime target for hackers. On the morning of May 28th, another exploit took place, this time taking aim at liquidity platform Jimbos Protocol. Jimbos Protocol got exploited today – May 28th. According to an update by PeckShield, the hack resulted in a loss of around...Read More
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a warning on fake job ads that lure people to Southeast Asia, where “victims are held against their will and forced to commit international crypto scams on unsuspecting victims.” These scam mills usually put up ads on social media and lure their victims by promising well-paid...Read More
The Twitter account of American music producer and DJ Steve Aoki has been compromised and used to conduct a phishing scam that led to the loss of at least $170,000 worth of crypto assets. According to a Friday tweet by on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, the attacker utilized their illicit access to Aoki’s account to execute the...Read More
A United States Court has granted a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging Binance’s involvement in a pig butchering scam that stole roughly $8 million from its victim. According to a recent filing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Amos Mazzant granted Binance’s motion to dismiss the case for...Read More
Months after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged eight people allegedly involved with orchestrating the $45 million CoinDeal scam, the Department of Justice has gone after another party. A 57-year-old resident of Las Vegas, Bryan Lee, was charged with conspiring with the main culprit believed to be behind the scam that defrauded over 10,000 investors....Read More
The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court ruled that the Vietnamese residents – Ho Ngoc Tai and Tran Ngoc Hoang – will spend their lives in prison for kidnapping an individual and stealing $1.5 million worth of bitcoin from him. 14 other people who also took part in the crime received sentences between 9 and...Read More
Developers of decentralized exchange (DEX) Swaprum have drained $3 million in ether (ETH) tokens from the protocol in an apparent rugpull, otherwise known as an exit scam. The exchange, launched on the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum, offers high farming rewards, low swapping fees, and potential earnings of up to 100% annual percentage yield (APY). Swaprum...Read More
Fuelled by hype and hysteria, memecoins went from an obscure and bizarre niche to a massive gambling vehicle that made people millionaires overnight. PEPE is the latest sensation that captured the imagination of some of the most insatiable degens in the space. This particular frog-themed coin continued to ascend to dizzying heights as FOMO engulfed...Read More
